Horace Greeley High School

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Horace Greeley High School
Home of the Fighting Quakers
Established	-
School type	Public
Principal	Andrew Selesnick
Assistant Principals	Mark Bayer, Michele Glenn, and Michael Taylor
Location	Chappaqua, New York, USA
Mascot	Quakers
Colors	Blue and Orange
Website	Horace Greeley Home Page

Horace Greeley High School is a public, four-year secondary school located in Chappaqua, New York and serving the Chappaqua Central School District. As of 2003, the school principal is Andrew Selesnick. The school's enrollment stands at roughly 1,300.

Horace Greeley is nationally respected for its high academic standards. It currently offers 23 advanced placement courses and came in at #42 in Newsweek's 2005 ranking of America's best high schools. Recent years have seen approximately one-fifth of graduating seniors recognized by the National Merit Scholarship committee; the class of 2004 included 25 National Merit semifinalists; the class of 2005 had 16; the class of 2007, 22. The mean SAT score among graduating seniors in the Class of 2005 was 1269 (612 Verbal and 657 Math). 97% of the Class of 2005 went on to higher education, 96% to four-year colleges.

The high school is also a regional, and in some cases national, powerhouse in several extracurricular programs. Its quiz bowl team won the National Academic Championship in 2003, and placed among the top six teams at the national tournament in five of the six years between 2000 and 2005. The Horace Greeley Debate Team has been successful at many regional tournaments as well as national tournaments, and has sent debaters to States every year since its inception in 2002. The Science Olympiad and Model United Nations teams have also won numerous accolades, as have the newspapers and yearbook. In addition, the high school's orchestra, chorus, and band are consistent winners of the Music in the Parks state competitions held annually at Six Flags in New Jersey.

Distinctive programs at Horace Greeley include the LIFE (Learning Independently From Experience) school, an alternative school for grades 11-12 located on campus; independent study and senior project options; a child study program linked to an on-site preschool; college-level classes offered through a partnerhsip with Syracuse University; and a science research program to prepare students for prestigious competitions like the Intel Science Talent Search. Arts and athletic offerings are extensive, and classes are offered in five foreign languages under most circumstances: Spanish, French, Latin, and, at the LIFE school, Italian. Russian was previously offered, but is no longer taught. In the 2005-2006 school year, Ancient Greek was taught for the first time.

The school is named for Horace Greeley, a U.S. presidential candidate and editor of The New York Tribune who made his home in Chappaqua late in life. One of the school's two student newspapers, The Greeley Tribune, is an additional tribute to the newsman. The other paper is The Advocate and the school's yearbook is The Quaker, also the school's mascot. Recently, Sports Roundup, the school's student run magazine on high school and professional sports, has also become a hit.

Other student organizations at Greeley include the Political Action Club, the umbrella community service group S.H.A.R.E., S.A.D.D.D. (Students Against Drinking and Drugging while Driving), Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), Alliance for Equality, Students for Social Justice, the Horace Greeley Improvisational Acting Troupe, and Amnesty International, among many others. On Wednesdays, classes are shortened to allow clubs to meet for an hour at the start of the day.

Sports are also popular on campus and among the diverse offerings are varsity programs in baseball, basketball, bowling, cheerleading, field hockey, football, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse, skiing, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and cross country, volleyball, and wrestling. Though Greeley football has made many long post-season runs, the town's titles lay with the cross country team. The school's only state championship came in 2002 and was won by the cross country team. In 2006, the school's girls' cross-country team won the League and Sectional titles, and finished 2nd in Class A States. Fox Lane High School, in nearby Bedford, New York, is HGHS's traditional rival in athletics.

[edit] After Greeley

Many Horace Greeley graduates matriculate at top-ranked universities including Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, and The University of Pennsylvania. The nation's top liberal arts colleges, such as Swarthmore College, Amherst College, and Williams College, are also host to Greeley graduates. Cornell University is particularly popular, and usually accepts 10 to 20 graduating seniors; in any given year there are 80 to 90 total Greeley alumni in Cornell's undergraduate and graduate programs. Binghamton University is also a highly popular college choice. Other popular schools include Syracuse University, Washington University in St. Louis, and New York University (NYU).